NYC phone book note, circa 1966

From July 1966 to January 1967, John Cage and Morton Feldman recorded several conversations for radio at WBAI in New York City (happily published by MusikTexte in 1993). In a conversation in July, 1966, they ended up talking about looking names up in the phone book:

“I’m sure there’s only one John Cage in the telephone book, but there are quite a few Morton Feldmans in the New York book. Varèse once called me and said he’s just called another Morton Feldman. And he said to him, ‘Well, are you the composer?’ …and the man said, ‘No, I’m in lingerie.'”

About Me

Sydney Boyd is a critic and scholar in Houston, TX. She holds degrees in both English and music and currently works as a Spatial Studies Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities Research Center at Rice University. She studies how music shapes narrative temporalities in 20th-century literature and, occasionally, returns to her origins as a violinist.